Coq Au Vin in a Le Creuset Dutch Oven

About ten years ago, my wife Emma got me a mid-1960s Nikon Nikkormat 35 millimeter camera for my birthday.  It’s about the size and weight of a brick.  Walking around with a Nikkormat used to feel super-cool, like I was an old school traditionalist with a discerning eye.  Now, in the digital age, it feels more like I could be mistaken for an anthropologist returning from a dig around the West 20s of Manhattan.  But I love this camera.  It takes the most amazing pictures, and it’s built to last a lifetime. For nearly a decade, the Nikkormat stood alone in my mind as the single best gift I’ve ever received.  But when my brother- and sister-in-law gave Emma and me a bright orange Le Creuset Dutch Oven this past summer, I had a sneaking feeling the Nikkormat might be in trouble. 

If you don’t know about Le Creuset, let me be the first to inform you that you are badly lost on the Internet.  Still, you’re here now, so let me fill you in.  Le Creuset makes the kind of pots that never get put away; they stay on your stovetop for 40 years.  They’re the kind of pots that get burned into your children’s memory and immediately evoke emotions that transcend food, kitchens and cooking.  They look great, coming in the most fantastic range of colors, but that’s almost beside the point.  They’re built to perform.  They move easily from the stovetop to the oven.  They get amazingly hot, and cook with perfect evenness. The lids alone weigh more than half a dozen Nikkormats.

The first few months we had our Le Creuset Dutch Oven, I felt myself stealing glances at it every time I passed through the kitchen; and making excuses to use it even when I didn’t have to (more than once, I hard boiled a single egg for my daughter in it).  It may sound pathetic, but it felt like I was falling in love with a pot.  But not just any pot.  This pot was beautiful and brilliant.  It was capable.  Ambitious even.  It felt like our whole lives together lay waiting ahead of us….

Mind you, this was still the middle of summer.  While that may be the perfect time to start a romance, it’s not exactly the best time to cook coq au vin.  And that’s really what I wanted to do.  From the moment I laid eyes on our Le Creuset, I pictured making coq au vin in it.   Of course, somewhere deep in the recesses of my mind there was the fear-of-flambé factor – a vague set of semi-violent images that included alcohol and a very large fire. I knew that if I really thought about it, I would feel intimidated and out of my league.  But none of that mattered then. 

Time to Make Coq au Vin

Then, suddenly, it was November.  Emma and I had nine guests coming over for dinner, and I found myself staring at the Le Creuset, wondering if we could really pull this off.  

Looking at a number of different coq au vin recipes helped in one way (I found out that it was NOT necessary to flambé) and made things more complicated in another (I found out that there are a lot of different methods for cooking this classic French dish). 

Furthermore, with the number of guests we were having, I knew I would have to at least double the recipe I decided to go with; and would have to navigate what I knew could be very different experiences with two very different sets of pots and pans (one non-stick frying pan, and one stainless steel one; plus one stainless steel stockpot, and the Le Creuset). 

I knew it would all be a bit fiddly, but as I plunged 21 pieces of chicken into two large bowls of cheap red wine and a bouquet garni of fresh thyme and bay leaves, then put it all in the fridge to marinate overnight, I couldn’t help feeling just a little, well, French.  

24 hours later, the chicken came out dyed a very deep purple.  If Barney the Dinosaur was finally and mercifully slaughtered, as many wish he would be, these could have been the steaks that resulted from it.  

But I digress. Before I could do anything with the chicken, there were several rounds of things that went in and out of the frying pans – bacon, pearl onions, mushrooms, etc. Then the chicken got braised in batches too.  Oddly I found the non-stick pan to work better on the chicken than the stainless steel, and I wondered if it had anything to do with a decision I made to use more of the bacon fat left in the pans rather than all the butter that the recipe called for.  Nonetheless, I was quite pleased with how things were progressing overall – the chicken skin had turned golden brown, and our apartment smelled très, très bien.

Somewhere in there, the super-cool old school traditionalist chefs would have done a flambé, but I just used a little brandy to deglaze the pans, then transferred everything to the stockpot and Dutch oven.  I set the flame low, regardless of what the recipe called for, because I knew it would be quite some time before we all sat down to eat.  I checked the vegetables I was roasting, then just sat back with a glass of wine and waited for our guests to arrive.

Among our friends who were there that night, several are pretty serious cooks, and all of them love to eat.  One, Ellen, works in food and wine publishing.  Another, Tina, makes three separate stops just to get the assortment of olives she likes.  Then there’s Jack, who arrived talking about a ceramic liner he’s looking for to fit his unusually sized oven because he’s begun to bake his own baguettes.

So it was a tough room.  Looking around at everyone, I unexpectedly got a little hot under the collar.  Sure, the coq au vin smelled good, but you never know. 

Plus, there are always curve balls, and this night was no exception.  First, the kids had to eat, which always takes ages. Then, right before dinner was to be served, an entire bottle of (good) wine broke on our kitchen floor, sending glass and (good) wine everywhere. Emma and others went into crisis mode trying to clean it up, while my thoughts went immediately to the coq au vin which was still simmering away on our stove, now nearly a full two hours overdue.

By the time I began spooning up, there were a number of bones coming out of the Le Creuset that were totally bare.  The meat had slipped right off, and ended up directly in the sauce.  For the pieces that remained intact, it was tenuous at best, and highly temporary.

As we began to eat, I heard a number of soft moans rising from around the table. Feeling more French than ever, I made as if I heard nothing. Meanwhile, my thoughts turned to everything I had learned about coq au vin in the last day:

It’s almost impossible to overcook.   As a result, it’s an outstanding dish for a large group, especially on a chilly day. 

It’s really easy.  It’s almost like a stew. And yet others think it’s complicated.  So you get all the credit without taking any of the risk. 

It’s going to taste good. C’mon, is it particularly surprising that combing things like wine and bacon and butter should taste good?  I had two guests go to the kitchen on their own mid-way through meal, and helped themselves to two ramekins full of just the sauce, which they drank at the table as if it were tea.  I told them both that I never wanted to kiss them more than I did at that moment. 

As for the Le Creuset Dutch Oven, this experience has confirmed for me once again – in our house, there are some things that simply will never go out of style.

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